Guides: Political Science: Journal Articles & Books

Locating Books in the Penn Libraries

The Penn Libraries, including the social science collections in the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, provide a wide range of print and electronic books for all areas of politics and international relations.

E-books at Penn
Go to the Penn Catalog and view listings and links to all of our e-book databases.
Library Catalog
Search the library catalog to explore a wide selection of library print and electronic books, journal and newspaper titles, videos, sound recordings, manuscripts, conference proceedings, and many other resources owned or subscribed to by the Penn Libraries.

General Article Databases

Two major commercial database vendors—EBSCO and ProQuest—are widely used to provide e-books, political science journals, and peer-reviewed articles. Universities will usually provide access to databases from one or both vendors. Important things to know about EBSCO and ProQuest.

Both provide access to dozens of individual subject databases that use a single search interface.
Both provide a varied mix of scholarly journals, trade publications, general magazines, and newspaper resources.
Both are multidisciplinary, which means they cover many subject areas, including political science.

EBSCO MegaFile
General, multidisciplinary periodical database, covering all scholarly disciplines, with many general and popular magazines, and news sources. Includes bibliographic citations with indexing and abstracts for more than 16,000 periodicals.
ProQuest
ProQuest is a large, multidisciplinary database with thousands of titles in full-text. It serves as the central resource for researchers at all levels in all subjects. Over 160 subjects areas are covered extensively in this product including business and economics, health and medical, news and world affairs, technology, social sciences and more.

Subject Databases

The following list provides the top subject-specific research databases for locating political science and public policy journals and articles.

Annual Review of Political Science
The Annual Review of Political Science, in publication since 1998, covers significant developments in the field of Political Science including political theory and philosophy, international relations, political economy, political behavior, American and comparative politics, public administration and policy, and methodology.
EBSCOhost Political Science Complete
This database provides indexing and abstracts for top-ranked political science scholarly journals, recent reference works, and professional conference papers. Its coverage consists of topics such as law and legislation, comparative politics, political theory, international relations, humanitarian issues, and non-governmental organizations.
Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO)
CIAO is a source for theory and research in international affairs. It includes scholarship, working papers from university research institutes, occasional papers series from NGOs, foundation-funded research projects, proceedings from conferences, books, journals, case studies for teaching, and policy briefs.
International Political Science Abstracts
Abstracts in English or French to articles selected from over 1,000 international journals. Topics covered include political science method and theory, political thinkers and ideas, governmental and administrative institutions, political process, international relations, and national and area studies.
PAIS Index
PAIS Index covers issues in the public debate through coverage of a wide variety of international sources, including journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, grey literature, research reports, conference papers, web content, and more. PAIS International is the current file covering 1972 to the present, and PAIS Archive includes the content from printed volumes published 1915-1976.
Policy Commons
Policy Commons is a one-stop community platform for objective, fact-based research from the world's leading policy experts, nonpartisan think tanks, IGOs and NGOs. They treat think-tank publications as a formal body of literature in its own right, with tools to systematically search it, cite it, understand its impact, catalog it, and preserve it for the long term. Now includes archived content from defunct Policy Archive.
Policy File
Policy FIle provides access to international and domestic policy papers and gray literature, with abstracts and links to timely reports, papers, and documents from think tanks, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), research institutes, advocacy groups, agencies, and other entities.
Political Science Network
The Political Science Network on SSRN is an open access preprint server that provides a venue for authors to showcase their research papers in our digital library, speeding up the dissemination and providing the scholarly community access to groundbreaking working papers and early-stage research.
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
Provides citations, abstracts, and indexing of the international serials literature in political science and its complementary fields, including international relations, law, and public administration. 67% of the more than 1500 monitored journals are published outside the United States, and there are nearly 500,000 records beginning in 1975. Some of the records have full-text links and coverage including all aspects of political science, as well as international relations and comparative politics.

Other Scholarly Databases

The following databases offer access to scholarly and peer-reviewed academic journals across most academic disciplines. Also listed are open access databases providing the latest working papers. Working papers are scholarly articles in the process of being written for submission to scholarly journals. Because working papers are not yet peer-reviewed, their quality can range widely. However, they can still provide you with a wealth of scholarly information on a topic, along with references that can lead you to other useful articles.

America History and Life
Database covering scholarly literature about all aspects of history.
IBSS - International Bibliography of the Social Sciences
1951-present. Bibliographic citations and subject indexing for the international journal article and book literature in anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology.
JSTOR
JSTOR provides access to scholarly journals, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. In addition to journal articles, users can access books, book chapters, ebooks, and primary source documents.
Project Muse
Provides full-text access to high-quality scholarly journals and articles from the humanities, arts, and social sciences.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
Composed of several specialized research networks in the social sciences, SSRN provides abstracts of scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers in the social sciences. Full-text available for some papers.
Web of Science
An index of over 8,500 academic journals. Provides citation reference indexing through five Cumulates six databases: (1) Arts and Humanities Citation Index; (2) Conference Proceedings; (3) Citation Index - Science; (4) Emerging Sources Citation Index; (5) Science Citation Index Expanded; and (6) Social Sciences Citation Index. The citation databases provide access to an article's cited references. You may take an article and find other, more recent papers that cite it.

Core Academic Journals

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data from approximately 12,000 journals from publishers in over 80 countries. You can use JCR to find the best journals published within specific research areas.

The following journals are listed in the JCR as the ten most cited, best-quality journals for 2023 in the political science category. To review the full JCR list of top-cited political science journals, go to Journal Citation Reports and choose Categories > Social Sciences, General > Political Science.